August 23, 2011

Xournal – A Great Note-Taking Application For Linux

Xournal
is an amazing little program that has many great purposes, including
the situation mentioned above. If you can develop a simple and
easy-to-follow organization structure with your notes, this program can
easily become one of your must-haves. Best of all, it runs great on Linux!

What Is It?

Xournal,
simply put, is a note-taking Linux application. However, instead of
getting a blank box to enter information into, you get a blank piece of
“paper” every time you open it up. And that’s all it does, aside from
giving you all the tools you could possibly need to pour your heart out
on that virtual piece of paper.

Basic Features

If
you go ahead and try making a mark on your paper as you would in an
image manipulation program, you’ll immediately know what’s going on.
Xournal lets you mark on your paper with any lines or handwriting you
want. It also has tools for writing text in case you don’t want to write
everything out on your trackpad. It also lets you highlight anywhere on
the paper, giving you the flexibility as well as the feel of actually
writing notes and annotating.

Further Uses

Starting
with a blank piece of paper to take very customized notes is a great
thing, but being able to annotate PDF files is even better. Just fire up
Xournal and choose “Annotate PDF” under the File menu to open
any PDF that you have access to, and it quickly loads into the program
and you’re ready to start annotating. It’s definitely a handy feature,
especially if you want to write some notes while reading one of MakeUseOf’s many PDF guides!

If
you look around some more, you’ll find that the menus are packed with
plenty of options at your disposal. Honestly, there are more options
that I can even wrap my head around, so you’re more than likely to be
covered in case you have a special need. And surprisingly, Xournal is a
lightweight application, even with the large range of options. With a
barely marked page open, Xournal takes less than 5MB from your RAM!
Tablet
owners will have even more pleasure while using Xournal. With the right
hardware, it can literally become your virtual paper that you can write
on without any issues. Xournal even goes down to subpixels instead of
just pixels to create the cleanest, smoothest, and most accurate lines
that, when using a tablet, will make up your legible handwriting.

Conclusion

Xournal
is an amazing piece of software that holds only a small amount of
attention from the community. It deserves much more, and considering
that the last version of Xournal came out in 2009, it could definitely
use some attention once again. Although my imagination can’t think of
what else Xournal could possibly include, I’m sure there are enough
people to make it even more valuable.
Do you use Xournal? If so,
what was your best experience while using it? Whether you currently use
it or not, how do you think it would increase your productivity and
level of organization?